THE BODY AS A TERRITORY IN RAW CLAY
Developing Formative Histories/Indexical and Involuntary Markings
Observational essay/account whilst work is resident in the Yard,
Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft
Temporality. The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. A clay form with its pre-performative drawing used as a template.
These distinctively different yet closely related works are arranged with the clay piece on its custom made trolley with its calico material that acts as a sheet on which the clay work rests. The drawing is placed behind it fastened to a wall with the drawings bottom edge just making contact with the floor adjacent to the castors that grant the clays supportive trolley mobility. The clay work has a direct relation to this adjacent drawing, the drawing is revealing the traced female that is just discernable on the surface of the clay. On closer inspection of the drawing it is just possible to see a rubbing taken from the periphery of the clay form. Both the paper and the clay seem to be in some reflective mode of mutual intimacy, marks transferred between one another during the manufacture of both are subtly replicated on the form of one and the surface of another. The pierced clay slab (vessel) is the first visible casualty of the entropic process of shrinkage. A significant crack separates the clay vessel into two separate but unique entities that share the same defect as if they were still whole. This division through the continent of the body has been subtly marked by the raised furrow of silica deposited when the clay bodies were in closer proximity. The calico has also rendered a new visual territory around the entire periphery of the form, created by the deposited silica sand and the resultant shrinkage that is taking place. There is the sense of this form moving in two dimensions, creating an extended footprint of previously covered territory whilst continuing to shrink bodily within the details and markings on its surface. This phenomena seems to give the piece a strange complexity of both temporality and a duration on which that temporality is directly charted, the calico is instrumental in registering this perception. The agencies of both the silica sand and the calico sheet between them regulate and guide our understanding of the observation of the clays infinitesimal shrinkage. The compression of the clays structure due to its shrinkage increases its density and visually alters the arrangement of the piercing that are mapped over its surface, the concise circles and holes cut through the clay have now blended into the overall tension imparted by shrinkage, there is a sense that precision of the marks, their machined appearance which contrasted to the locality to the clay around them has been lost, reclaimed by the inner natural torsions taking control of the piece as a whole. The clays surface with its sandy granular deposits whose particle size has become visually larger at the expense of its hosts shrinkage now auger for a territory, a land mass devoid of water, the sense of this territory becoming anhydrous, giving rise to thoughts of thirst and fragility, even the once precise holes give the impression of barren watering places isolated within a landscape in a state of drought. The once visible markings are now obscured by the action of the shrinking territory and its granular coating as it now gains in its ability to obscure features. The traced and drawn female form is still harboured somewhere under this obscuring sand. Yet she now resides as a brittle uncompromising inscription of her former self, the plasticity that once gave her a sensuality into the yielding and pliable surface has succumbed to the unstoppable internal shrinkage of the clay particles starved of moisture. The clay is acknowledging the atmosphere of its given surroundings, our environment.
The Draught, J G Ballard
The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Disposition of the Body, Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract)
The clay suffers, dehydrates as its moisture is absorbed by the surrounding atmosphere, giving up its plasticity and its almost inhuman sensuality and tactility. Presented amongst us, it is rendered into a state of its own homogeneity Conversely the working drawing which has evolved from being a simple template to aid the registration of celestial information within the territory of the body. Has itself become involved in its own creation as an art object. On completing its initial purpose, the task of transferring details onto the surface of the embryonic clay form. It has now become embroiled and entangled as it were with the creative issues of the clay form; “they” have become members of the same intuitions the same creative flux, sisters. The drawn “sister” contains the origin of their shared inscription, the originating female trace. The gesture and act still remains, visible only by physical impression of transference; which is left proud, raised and projecting passed the original flatness of the paper. These material read together render insights into superimposed temporalities shared by the art object, they question and reveal the reverse side of origins, of the work or its working drawing, they all underline the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary art practice.
The Drawing strangely or ironically displays values in a state of stasis, now lost with its sister. The cyanotype “sea” with its fluidity bleeding into the porosity of the news print. The “ streams” of residues washed from other areas are now deposited into the interior space where they have collected finally to evaporate leaving their watery remains. Only the clarity of the “permanent” marker pen remains untouched by any entropic activity. Objectively the drawing materials has slowed down to the point when one might grant it a measure of completeness. Its particular temporalities now exist within the interactions it can manifest from others, other things, other situations that are drawn into its proximity, its particular field of intuitive reverberations, its unique dwelling place.
The clay form seems to have gathered up its history of temporal acts that culminate in its present form. This presented object, with temporalities marked on site has become a vehicle, a vessel for its own entropic voyage, another temporality that itself adds a spatial dimension. This object for me appears to be totally contingent yet relational to aspects of space and time, it exists uniquely “once” in the present, presence it creates with its observer. The result of this contingent object is that “we through it” are constantly travelling away from its point of origin, we as a result feel the passage of the entropic value of time through the human condition. Whereas the drawing does refer to a now and a past, an elsewhere ,it seems locked between these two comprehensions.
The clay form has clearly an entropic element which seems to give rise to phenomenologically driven inquiry which in turn helps to creates our sense of a spatiality. Uniquely formed between observation and our own movement, we are in effect made to sense that the object heralds our own becoming.
Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
Visualising Environmental Agency
"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Art and Agency, Alfred Gell 1998)"
"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."
Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.
Drawing intervention and speculative sculptural environment.
Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.
Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School.
Teacher Education Manual
Insight-Bohm-Krishnamurti. 1979
David Bohm, Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain, and that in this illumination the brain itself begins to act differently?
Krishnamurti, You are quite right. That's all-that is what takes place. That is -this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set.
a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari
Assemblage
Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine
The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.
The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.
Ann-Sophie Lehmann
